Apparently Not The King
An Overhead Conversation Between Two Early Teens

Overheard in a fast-food restaurant:

A: Who is Elvis Presley?

B: You don’t know Elvis Presley?!

A: No, I don’t. Who is Elvis Presley?

B: He invented rock.

A: Nope, I’ve never heard of him.

Laughter is the Best Medicine
But What Exactly Does It Cure?

I live in an impacted environment.
My neighbour’s pushy, my life’s a drill.
I wonder what I can extract from this experience.
There is a void that needs to be filled.

PS: This wisdom is hurting me.

Escalator, Not Elevator

Something funny (somewhat related to an upcoming post) for Friday. :)

I Lost My Thoughts on the Internet
Apple iPhone 3G Swallowed My Twitter Posts

I posted a few times on Twitter yesterday but my tweets were lost while being transported in a whale that was carried by eight orange birds who were undecided on the direction of travel. LOL.

Well, actually Twitter buckled during the announcement of Apple iPhone 3G at the WWDC. Earlier this morning I’d cleared my cache after doing a transaction, leaving me with no trace of what I’d been surfing for yesterday so now I have totally forgotten what I posted yesterday. It might have something to do with the France vs. Romania Euro match that was on the same time yesterday or a disease that afflicts older cats or it might be a reply to one of your tweets.

I sometimes use a notepad application first before posting, something I clearly didn’t do yesterday! Have you ever experience the fear of losing your writing in the middle of posting it?

Sleepy Tales
Lucid Dreams and Segmented Polyphasic Sleep

“It’s possible to dream what you want to dream!”

I’ve been sleeping an average of 5 hours a night the past few weeks with an nap at in the afternoon and sometimes if I’m still sleepy, another nap early evening. I see this continuing for at least another month (especially with the Euro 2008 matches to watch in June!).

My dreams are more vivid now, and now more than ever, I’m aware of the fact that I’m dreaming and can control my dreams. I recently found the term for this:

Lucid Dream

“A lucid dream, also known as a conscious dream, is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. A lucid dream can begin in one of two ways. A dream-initiated lucid dream (DILD) starts as a normal dream, and the dreamer eventually concludes that he or she is dreaming, while a wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD) occurs when the dreamer goes from a normal waking state directly into a dream state with no apparent lapse in consciousness.” Wikipedia

Apparently, you can learn how to achieve lucid dreams. So it’s possible to dream what you want to dream!

Segmented Sleep

I’ve not experienced any adverse effects from the reduced number of sleeping hours apart from feeling very sleepy after lunch (then again, I’ve always been sleepy after lunch with or without enough sleep), and this is relieved by taking a nap.

I was slightly worried about the effects it would have on my body but the article What is a natural sleep pattern? on Scienceblogs is reassuring to a degree:

“In a natural state, humans do not sleep a long consecutive bout throughout the night. The natural condition is bimodal - two bouts of sleep interrupted by a short episode of waking in the middle of the night.”

Steve Pavlina took segmented sleep a step further by experimenting with Uberman or Polyphasic sleep, dividing his sleep into 6 half-hour segments and sleeping a total of 3 hours a day for nearly half a year. Yikes!

Given a choice, I think I’d still prefer to sleep 7-hour straight at night but at least I can rest in relative comfort now. :)

Idol Conversation

Me: “Ma, I’m going off now, is there anything you want me to get?”

Mum: “They shouldn’t have done it!”

Me: “Done what?”

Mum: “Boot Michael out last week. It was Idols Give Back week!”

Me: “Michael? Who? No, no, I asked if you wanted anything from the store. Milk? Bread?”

Mum: “Ryan shouldn’t have implied that there would be no elimination this week…”

Me: “Erm, okay… I’m going now.. bye!”

Food Trip

I have a habit of imagining eating different food when I’m working. It leaves me hungry and irritable for many hours. But I do it anyway. I sometimes describe my cravings in detail to B, causing one or both of us to eventually cave in to mindless snacking. I’ll share it with you guys here today:

Good, hot coffee in a paper cup.
First the cup (I have a thing for paper cups)– a thick uncoated stock, slightly rough to the touch. Then the coffee — dark with an unmistakable intoxicating aroma. I add a little milk, stir it gently and take a long, slow sip.

Oreo cheesecake
Slightly salty, a hint of bitterness, all rich and sweet. No, thanks, I can’t, wait, yes please, just a small slice. For now.

Fresh salmon sushi
Succulent, sweet salmon and a touch of wasabi on top of vinegared rice. I dip it ever so slightly in soya sauce and think to myself, “Lyn (a friend who doesn’t eat raw fish) doesn’t know what she is missing”

Shiny glazed donut
Sinking my teeth into a warm pillow of deliciousness, the glaze crack and crumble onto my lap. My pants are dirty but my mouth is happy. :o

Chocolate almond bar
This is it — the perfect chocolate bar - in between milk and dark. A dark milk? Or a milky dark? It doesn’t matter, really. There are almonds, toasted to brown perfection with every satisfying bite.

Pancakes
See formula for simple happiness number 2.

What are you craving today?

Saved by a Sketchbook

I have a lot of sketchbooks which I alternate between, depending on my mood or where I’m going to, but for a few months now, I’ve stuck to an A5-sized sketchbook with brown pages that resemble kraft paper. It is now my favourite sketchbook. I’d be very pissed if anything were to happen to it.

For no reason whatsoever, I decided to bring along a second sketchbook with me as I go out for breakfast today. I wolfed down my breakfast, did a few quick sketches and then decided to go home. I’d usually take my time to eat, draw, write and soak in the sights and sounds around me. But I needed to use the bathroom and since I really hate dirty toilets (I don’t know for sure if the toilet there was actually dirty, I just assumed it was), coupled with the fact that my home is only 2 minutes away, I decided to rush home.

Back home, I put my shopper bag on the dining room table, did my “business”, and then proceeded to play with one of the cats for awhile. When I came back to the dining area to get my bag, I found it dripping wet. With pee. Lots of pee.

To say that I’m annoyed at the situation would be the understatement of the century. I took out the contents of my bag and assessed the damage. My coin purse, a birthday present which I only started using recently, was soaked. My wallet and everything inside it was marinated with Eau de Chat. Among other things, 10,000 yen (money left from my Tokyo trip which I’ve totally forgotten about until now), business cards, pieces of paper containing ideas for my projects, a stack of receipts I needed as part of my business records, all tainted with the yellow tint of urine.

As I pulled out one wet item after another, I found my favourite sketchbook intact, dry as can be, wrapped between the pages of my second sketchbook, which took the brunt of the pee-age. Ha ha! Lucky me!

I spent the next hour cleaning, disinfecting and laying out things to dry. But let’s not focus on that. :|

Ants in My Pants

I was out all day today.

In the morning, while waiting for a cab at a very crowded area, I felt a tingling sensation running up my legs. After awhile I realised I had my feet just an inch away from a mound of large, red ants and, predictably, a few had crawled up my feet! I started stamping about like a mad person in the middle of the crowd. Amazingly, I managed to shake every last one of the angry looking ants without getting a single bite! I did however, squash one particularly big one to its death. I’m so sorry ant, it was a reflex reaction.

The rest of the day went by quite uneventfully until the time I had to go home. I was happily hippity-hoppity-hopping way down a long stairway when I decided to skip a few steps. This proved to be a good move as I would have plunged my feet straight into a colony of big-headed ants otherwise. What are the odds of my narrowly missing stepping on an ants’ nest twice in a day!? Counting my blessings, I continued walking down the flight of stairs with trepidation.

A few minutes later, I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green when I thought I felt something crawling on my feet again. Obviously after two encounters with different groups of ants, I was extra sensitive today but what I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that I had my feet, once again dotted with ants — this time fast-moving orange (red? yellow? crazy?) ants. And once again I had to do my crazy dance to get rid of all of them. After moving away a safe distance, I noticed that I was standing just a mere inch away from a very bustling ant highway, 3 inches wide. An inch away! Again! The third time today! Thankfully, I didn’t get bitten at all! Phew!

Too much ant drama for one day.

Junk Food Day

After looking at the cute stuff from Re-Ment, I found myself craving for a lot of things. The sad thing is, I got myself a lot of junk food and ate them in one sitting:

1 garlic butter bread
1 bowl instant noodles
1 coffee-filled chocolate bar
3 slices of white bread with chocolate spread
1 bag of salted nuts
6 Mentos
1 can of Pringles chips (oh oh!)

Not too proud of myself. I’m having a bit of a tummy ache. I wonder why…